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# The Languages We Don’t Yet Have
- URL: https://www.artsoftheworkingclass.org/text/the-languages-we-dont-yet-have/
- Published: 2026-09-30T08:04:30.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T08:06:27.000Z
- Description: Havîn Al-Sîndy, Céline Semaan, and Payam Sharifi in conversation with Hanno Hauenstein on translation, embodied memory, and the power to name experience.
- Author: Havîn Al-Sîndy
- Tags: #main-article, Q&As, Diaspora

An alphabet can carry an empire. An accent can open a door or close it. A memory can change in the telling—or remain without words. In this conversation at the Soft Power Festival, moderated by Hanno Hauenstein, Havîn Al-Sîndy, Céline Semaan, and Slavs & Tatars (represented by Payam Sharifi) examine language as a material through which power is exercised and belonging is negotiated. From the politics of writing systems to the expectations placed on artists working across languages, they ask what becomes visible through translation, what disappears, and who determines the terms of understanding.

Their positions do not settle into agreement. Sharifi, co-founder of Slavs and Tatars, approaches scripts as forms of hospitality and challenges the assumption that everything must be accessible in English. Semaan draws on displacement, family archives, and her work across art, writing, and media to explore translation’s possibilities and limits. Al-Sîndy asks a prior question: what happens when a language has already been altered by violence and the demand to become legible to others? For her, the difficulty extends into the body, its sounds, and the knowledge carried between people.

The discussion also turns its scrutiny on the festival’s own premise. Can soft power be redirected towards liberation without reproducing the methods it opposes? And can art help develop a language for experiences that inherited political vocabularies struggle to describe?

**Hanno Hauenstein:** We’re speaking against a backdrop in which people are trying to define what culture is, what counts as legitimate culture, and what doesn’t. It’s wonderful that Anahita and everyone involved in this festival have given us space to discuss these questions openly; which is something that isn’t necessarily taken for granted, especially in a time when words such as genocide to describe the situation in Gaza continue to be be delegitimized and policed in Germany

At the same time, language also just seems increasingly reduced these days. I see AI slop everywhere; it is something very vulgar and becoming ubiquitous. That is part of the context of this conversation, as well.

Let me introduce our speakers. Payam Sharifi is a co-founder of Slavs and Tatars, the artist collective whose work addresses the vast region between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China. Languages, alphabets, and ways of deciphering cultural expression are central to its practice.

Céline Semaan is an artist, writer, and founder of the independent media platform *Everything Is Political*. Her memoir, *A Woman Is a School*, explores questions of war, displacement, and memory. Language is also central to her work in this exhibition.

Havîn Al-Sîndy works at the intersection of the body, memory, war, and displacement. Her work here addresses organ theft in the context of Kurdistan, and language is at its core as well.

Let’s begin with you, Payam: why, actually, are Slavs and Tatars so obsessed with alphabets?

**Slavs and Tatars:** We tend to think of alphabets as innocent: an aleph looks like an aleph, an A like an A, and a B like a B. But if you look at their histories, alphabets accompany empires.

The Latin alphabet travelled with Christianity, the Arabic alphabet with Islam. In the region we work with, Cyrillic was associated first with Orthodox Christianity and later with Soviet colonisation in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

When the Soviets changed the writing systems of Muslim populations, part of the intention was to separate people from their attachment to Islam. These communities weren’t necessarily speaking Arabic; many spoke Turkic languages but used Arabic script.

There was even a movement to Romanise Russian, because Cyrillic itself was considered marked by Christianity, and this was an atheist revolution. Over the past century or two, the Latin alphabet has also become a vehicle for secularisation. Turkey’s alphabet reform under Atatürk is another example.

**Hanno:** How does that history resonate today? Why bring it into the present through works such as the carpet which you can see over there?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/B0240660-1.jpg)

Slavs & Tatars, **Sanft Power*, 2022\. Photo: Roman März

**Slavs and Tatars:** One principle of Slavs and Tatars has always been to do what other people aren’t doing. In more than twenty years, I don’t think we’ve used the term “decolonisation” in our work. Not because it isn’t important, but because I would rather do it than keep talking about it.

We have focused on the margins of the Muslim, Russian-speaking, and Turkic-speaking worlds, giving those places a platform rather than producing discourse about the act of doing so.

People who use non-Latin scripts are constantly transcribing and transliterating. Yet everyone talks about translation, and almost nobody thinks about transliteration.

**Hanno:** Could you explain what you mean by that?

**Slavs and Tatars:** Transliteration changes the script without changing the language. When I send a message in Russian, for example, I sometimes write it in Latin letters rather than switching my phone’s keyboard to Cyrillic. I can write Cyrillic; I just don’t always do it.

There is a disputed linguistic theory that we inhabit “script worlds.” We tend to think about linguistic worlds, but less about the ways communication is shaped by living within a Latin, Cyrillic, or Arabic-script world.

**Céline Semaan:** That resonates with me. I speak Arabic fluently, but I don’t read or write it. I was displaced at a young age, and when I returned to Beirut as a teenager, I didn’t feel able to learn its written form.

I describe myself as an illiterate Arabic-speaking woman, which is painful. I use Arabish all the time: Arabic written in Latin letters. I take the letters I know from English or French and use them to write Arabic.

**Hanno:** The language of decolonisation has become somewhat all-encompassing in the art world. However, this often comes *without* institutions giving up power – or allowing the very people who have been and continue to be affected by colonialism to define their own narratives. Does that resonate with your work in relation to Kurdistan, Lebanon, or Palestine?

**Havîn Al-Sîndy:** With Kurdish, I think we have to begin earlier. Arabic literature and calligraphy have a recognised place in Western culture. With Kurdish, we have to begin with the experience of a forbidden language: one you are prevented from speaking or hearing.

How do you talk about a language when its presence has been denied, when it survives in the body, in singing, and in forms that may not be recorded?

What interests me now is how Kurdish itself is changing. We search for Western theories through which to understand it and make it visible. In that process, letters, dialects, and accents are altered or overlooked. Visibility can reproduce the very patterns of colonisation we claim to oppose.

The debate is not only about which form of Kurdish should be dominant—Kurmanji, Sorani, Bahdini, Zaza, and others—but which will make us most legible to Western theorists.

**Hanno:** Are you saying that something gets lost in the effort to fit into a Western framework?

**Havîn:** It is about internalising the demand for visibility. People turn to Hannah Arendt or Foucault while neglecting their own philosophical traditions and Sufism.

Dengbêj singing, for example, carries an archive of Kurdish language. Yet poems, rhymes, and verses are being changed to make them more understandable to a Western audience.

This also changes the body. The tongue changes. People lose ways of rolling an R, making a sound, carrying a tone or a trill. Art should address not only the fact that a language has been violated, but how the body changes through the sounds of another language.

**Hanno:** Céline, can you relate to that, given your own work?

**Céline:** For me, decolonisation is not a metaphor. I’m thinking of the essay of that title, by Eve Tuck \[and K. Wayne Yang\]. \[1\] It insists on decolonisation’s relationship to Indigenous land and sovereignty.

In the contexts of Palestine and Lebanon, I also think about return: the land’s relationship with its Indigenous people. That doesn’t mean there is no room for people who arrive through migration or other histories, but sovereignty cannot simply disappear from the discussion.

When we say “decolonise your hair” or “decolonise design,” what do we mean? Is it enough to use Arabic letters or write from right to left? I want to return to the political proposition at the root of the word.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/B0240746.jpg)

Havîn Al-Sîndy, **Gûrçikê min — Pieces – in transition*, 2025 and Slavs & Tatars, **Duck’s Blood*, 2024\. Photo: Roman März

**Havîn:** I want to ask about “land back,” because the phrase shows how language can shape our thinking about colonisation.

There are cultures, including nomadic cultures, whose relationship to land does not begin with possessing it. When we use that phrase, do we risk returning to geography and borders?

In the Kurdish archives I work with, I encounter the return of people, culture, language, bodies, and food. I don’t necessarily encounter the same terminology. We need to recognise when we are describing experience through words inherited from an existing theory.

Take Rojava. I hear it described everywhere as a “model.” But it is not a model.

**Hanno:** Where do you hear that language? In mainstream media?

**Havîn:** In the media, on panels, in theoretical writing. Calling it a model turns it into a standard for describing democracy or resistance.

What happens if we admit that we don’t yet have the language to describe it? Recognising that we are trapped within a language can be productive. It means there is work to do.

**Hanno:** Do I understand correctly that this kind of discourse can impose a vocabulary on colonised people that they may not want or affirm?

**Céline:** I understand the point slightly differently, if I may. “Land back,” spoken in English, can sound as though land is a commodity. That is precisely the understanding the movement challenges.

Thank you for raising it, because otherwise someone could ask: what distinguishes Indigenous relations to land from colonial ownership if we use the same terms for both?

English is my third language. It can be very limiting when I try to express these cultural relationships. We search for words and cannot find exactly what we need.

As an immigrant and someone who has been displaced, I have spent my life translating culture. A friend once said to me that design is translation too: an arrow tells you where to go, a warning symbol communicates a situation visually.

I chose to write *A Woman Is a School* in English because I wanted to reach a particular audience and communicate cultural subtleties from my region. But the book also confronts the stubbornness of English and the ways it limits what I can say.

**Havîn:** My point isn’t only about English. I encounter the difficulty within Kurdish theory too. We are trying to describe experiences for which the available language is insufficient.

I’m tired of every new form of fascism being described as the same as something that came before. I’m not saying earlier theories are wrong or should be discarded. But we also need new language, texts, and theory.

That is why the term “soft power” interests and unsettles me. What are we doing with it here? What does its softness conceal about the processes that precede war?

I speak seven languages, but I still struggle to describe certain experiences in Kurdish, German, or English. I learned English from SpongeBob, so you can imagine the difficulty. We need the humility to say: we do not yet have the language to describe this.

A curator once told me that I would have a difficult time in the art world because she couldn’t identify what I was doing. She said the work seemed to happen before the art object. I said, “Yes—then you have the language.” She replied, “No, I still can’t write about it.” We laughed, and I found that exchange beautiful.

For me, it is no longer only about producing an artwork. The work needs a language too, or in ten years we may realise we have repeated the language of the colonisers.

**Hanno:** Let me jump on this point regarding your discomfort with the term “soft power”. What is this about? The association with cultural diplomacy as a state practice, allegedly opposed to war?

**Havîn:** How do you say *Verschleierung*?

**Hanno:** Concealment.

**Havîn:** Yes. That is the question: what the language conceals, including in Germany’s own ways of speaking.

**Hanno:** We’re having this discussion in English because this is the language we share, the smallest common denominator if you will. But that choice, of course, brings hierarchies of its own. Perhaps this panel should have been multilingual.

**Slavs and Tatars:** Honestly, yes. You could have spoken French, you could have spoken Kurdish.

**Céline:** I could also speak Arabic.

**Hanno:** The problem is that I couldn’t translate everything.

**Slavs and Tatars:** You don’t necessarily have to. English flattens things.

We recognise that Kurdish and many other languages are under threat. But we underestimate the pressure on major languages too. German and Persian each have roughly 140 million speakers—or perhaps 100 to 120 million for German, and a similar number for Persian. Those are rough estimates. \[2\] Yet in Germany and Austria, humanities researchers increasingly write in English. What happens to German as a language of thought over time?

I call English a plague of a language. We should stop speaking it whenever we can.

Germans often switch to English because they think it is polite. But how will someone learn German if you always switch? And is it necessarily hospitable? It can also keep someone from becoming part of the society. I would like people to speak German in a hospitable sense, not a nationalist one.

**Hanno:** Let me play devil’s advocate on this point, though. English *does,* after all, enable wide-ranging communication across cultural differences. It allows this conversation to happen. That may be a cliché, but there is truth to it.

Still, there are hierarchies embedded in how a language is used, where it is used, and which language someone chooses to address you in. Sinthujan Varatharajah and Moshtari Hilal have written about this in the context of Berlin. Would you say there is a form of resistance in refusing translation? If so, how does that show up in your work?

**Slavs and Tatars:** Very little of our work uses English. In Venice in 2019, we showed a series of panels—fifteen, I think—with perhaps six different languages, including Georgian, Russian, and Arabic. \[3\]

A *Financial Times* critic described the work, shown next to Rosemarie Trockel’s, as typical biennial art and completely illegible. It was the only time I wrote a letter to an editor. I found it revealing that a work could contain six or seven languages and be considered illegible because none was English. \[4\]

Seeing your script in a space can be a welcome. Someone encounters an Armenian and thinks: this is mine; this space belongs to me too. Language can be a form of hospitality, but you have to be deliberate about it.

**Hanno:** The dominance of English also reflects imperial power, including the power of the United States.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/B0240750.jpg)

Havîn Al-Sîndy, **Gûrçikê min — Pieces – in transition*, 2025\. Photo: Roman März

**Havîn:** But we also have to be honest about how dependent the art world’s economic systems are on English.

For me, translation isn’t forbidden. Sometimes it is necessary, and I love translating metaphor between languages. But we need to ask an earlier question: which languages and forms of knowledge are recognised in the first place?

If Kurdish has already been changed by violence and by the demand that I represent myself in a particular way, what exactly am I translating? Has a translation already taken place within my own language? Who has shaped it, and who gets to translate it again?

I often leave my films untranslated, but not simply to mark them as belonging to one community. I want to address the ways languages change through violence, sometimes without our recognising that it is happening.

Translation is becoming easier technically, including through AI. But what happens to the knowledge formed between people and languages? Kurdish changes through its relationship with Persian, and vice versa. That shared knowledge is what I worry about losing.

**Hanno:** Is your art an attempt to preserve such knowledge?

**Havîn:** Finally the artist is being asked about the art.

**Hanno:** Your work opened a history I personally knew very little about, to be honest. This incredibly brutal history of organ trade in Kurdistan. Could you elaborate on this?

**Havîn:** The forced removal of organs from Kurdish people under Saddam Hussein’s regime is an untold story. As sculptures, my kidneys are made of clay from Kurdistan. The clay itself already carries a kind of situatedness — it comes from there, from that ground, while the actual kidneys I'm talking about were taken to Germany. It's almost a reversal: this time the material stays in place, but it takes on the form of what was taken away.

The sculptures are motorised. They move very slightly, like breathing — something organic, almost alive, but also mechanically produced. That mattered to me: that you're not sure whether you're looking at an injury or a form of continuing to live. This movement is my attempt to make audible or visible language that doesn't yet exist in that form. And that's exactly where it also feels orphaned. A kidney that breathes, but without the body it belonged to. 

And there's also the other side: the person who stays behind and continues to live with only one kidney. That person carries a scar, and this scar also needs a language — not just a medical one that says "something was removed here," but one that can hold the act of continuing to live itself. The scar is proof that something happened, but it doesn't tell you how it happened, under what coercion, with what fear. 

**Hanno:** To clarify: organs were taken from Kurdish people and sent to recipients in Germany, who were not necessarily aware of the intense violence involved in this process.

**Havîn:** Yes. What interests me is also how the state violence was minimised: the idea that someone could survive with one kidney was used to suggest that no harm had been done to the people. The accounts describe state representatives arriving at homes and demanding a kidney, leaving a family to decide who would give it. But this history could not be spoken about openly. When people refer to it, they say, “The thing happened.” They don’t name it.

That is where the question of language begins for this work.

**Hanno:** I wasn’t aware of this before encountering the artwork. Céline, how does this relationship between language and memory resonate with your practice?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/B0240765.jpg)

Céline Semaan, **A Woman is a School*. Photo: Roman März

**Céline:** When I encountered Havîn’s work, I asked why she had chosen the kidney. Our conversation moved into how memories change when we speak about them. I asked whether that meant memory could be understood as fiction.

There was something freeing in that thought, because my work involves personal mythology: collecting fragments of memory and making a language from images.

I write books and essays, but in my visual practice I work with images and symbols. I’m interested in a language without words.

The mural here brings together found archives and personal photographs. Some images belong to a collective political archive, taken by photojournalists—often foreigners photographing war in our countries. Others come from a box of photographs I salvaged from our home in Lebanon, which was bombed in the 1980s.

We have very few of these physical traces. Working with them can feel like inventing a story, because I cannot always remember exactly what happened. Surviving war means living with interruptions in memory.

In my book, I describe a “mountain of shame,” with memories hidden behind it. Extracting family stories can feel like pulling a tooth. They don’t emerge when you want them to. Sometimes a question is met with rage: how dare you ask?

It took me forty years to gather those stories, and I had to do it gently. When I assembled the manuscript, I asked permission to share them. Some were removed because they were for us, not for the world. Respecting that distinction mattered.

There is also a fluidity of identity between Lebanon and Palestine, where these borders were drawn in the 1960s and 1970s. These borders are fake; there are no borders between Palestine and Lebanon. \[5\]

**Hanno:** Many Palestinian refugees have lived in Lebanon for decades, of course.

**Céline:** Yes, but I mean more than displacement. I’m talking about a continuity of land and life that cannot be separated so neatly into national categories. Borders also create barriers in how we speak and think.

In the United States, I encounter people who are beginning to understand Palestine but disconnect it from Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan. They want a single, clear designation. I’m trying to explain a relationship that crosses those distinctions.

**Hanno:** Your work reaches across art, writing, but also media, including the independent outlet *Everything Is Political*. How do you navigate those formats? Does art allow something that journalism – with its inherent obligations to factual precision and tayloring content to specific audiences – does not?

**Céline:** Art is language. It lets us think aloud, experiment, and make mistakes.

We live under intense scrutiny. A mistake can destroy a career or a life. I don’t mean simply saying something politically incorrect. I mean trying things, blurring the boundaries between identities and languages. Artistic practice needs room for that.

This festival brings people together to explore “soft power,” a term that ultimately means the CIA. The CIA is a soft power engine: it works with media and art, and it funds art. Who funds art in the United States? The CIA, through many different foundations. That is why Slow Factory doesn’t have any of those funds: we can’t just obey them. \[6\]

**Slavs and Tatars:** I would take a more sentimental position. For me, the masters of soft power are the French.

**Hanno:** What do you mean?

**Slavs and Tatars:** When I arrived in Germany, I spoke German with an Iranian accent. Then I wondered what would happen if I used my French accent instead. I started saying *ich* more like *ish*, and suddenly people on the phone treated me like a bourgeois gentleman. Doors opened.

That is extraordinary: the prestige a language can retain. People still aspire to Frenchness, and French culture continues to carry enormous influence.

**Havîn:** We hear all the time that French or Italian accents are beautiful. Why don’t we say how beautiful a Lebanese accent is?

**Slavs and Tatars:** Exactly. Soft power works through desire: how people want to dress, eat, or make love. Germany has a very different relationship to that.

**Céline:** It’s called a French kiss, not a German kiss.

**Slavs and Tatars:** Germany likes to imagine that everything rests on facts and rationalism. Soft power involves seduction, public relations, a kind of massaging of the message.

**Havîn:** But isn’t that also part of Germany’s postwar history?

**Slavs and Tatars:** I think Germany is afraid of soft power—or of charisma.

**Céline:** There is a history behind that fear. Hitler invested heavily in charisma and propaganda.

**Havîn:** I’m thinking about the softness of the language used to describe rebuilding after the war, bringing in migrant workers, and working together. Or *Erinnerungskultur*.

**Hanno:** What Germany calls Memory Culture….

**Havîn:** Yes. What does that term contain? What does its apparent softness do? For me, that too is a process of soft power.

**Hanno:** I hear two different meanings of ‘soft power’ in the room. One seems to concern the attempt to persuade others of our right to express ourselves. The other concerns states exercising influence through soft power instead of hard power.

Germany may lack the cultural glamour you describe, Payam, but wouldn’t you agree that – for example – its Goethe-Institutes around the world are attempts to extend its cultural influence.

**Slavs and Tatars:** My first encounter with the German language was at the Goethe-Institut in Almaty in 2011\. A curator took me there on a Tuesday evening, and it was packed. I asked to see the Alliance Française and the British Council, where much less seemed to be happening.

It was smart. But I read it in commercial terms too: teach German to people in a resource-rich country who may later become decision-makers, and who will they do business with?

**Céline:** I was being provocative. I believe in it too.

**Slavs and Tatars:** Everything we’re doing here is soft power.

**Céline:** I also question myself. Am I using similar methods, but for my people and my own purposes?

Slow Factory has become an engine with the ability to influence culture. We have repeatedly seen ideas we put into circulation reach the mainstream. It took years of work to develop that influence. I believe Slow Factory is a soft power engine for good that isn’t funded by anything, contrary to the stories people make up. Sometimes people send me messages saying, “You’re the CIA!” I say, “No, I wish—I’m not. I swear we’re poor.” \[8\]

**Havîn:** We are not being funded at the moment.

**Céline:** Recently, we spoke about Gloria Steinem being part of the CIA, and then it was everywhere. \[9\] That makes us pace ourselves and ask how we want to contribute to culture. We need to step back and think about the power we have.

In 2021, we published a post about Palestine that said: “It’s not that complicated; it’s colonialism.” It went viral. The familiar response had been, “It’s complicated; you need to understand both sides.” We wanted to challenge that framework by naming occupation and the foreign powers supporting it.

After 7 October, we produced around a thousand designs over the following year, often with ten to twenty slides each. It was an enormous amount of work.

At some point, we had to ask: are we still working with soft power? Are we producing propaganda? How do we contribute culturally without mimicking the oppressor?

Occupation wounds the imagination. We can end up wanting precisely what the dominant culture teaches us to want: the Birkin bag, the Chanel shoes, the big house. I want those things too. I watch the women on reality television and think: they seem so comfortable; everything seems fine.

Then I have to stop and ask whether I’m allowing my imagination to be colonised as well. Working with imagination is part of the task.

**Havîn:** But look at what has happened in this conversation. We have taken a term with a particular history and begun using it to describe our own political situations. Are we still talking about the same kind of power?

We cannot simply assume that a term travels unchanged into Palestine or Kurdistan. We have to ask which power we mean.

That returns us to what art can do. I don’t want to romanticise it. Art is deeply entangled with capitalism, and we also need to examine the far right’s involvement in museums, galleries, and the art market.

But art can help us work with new languages. We can let go of inherited ideas of what art must be and ask what language the present requires.

That is one possibility of bringing music, performance, journalism, and media together in a festival like this. We haven’t even begun to discuss social media or Instagram.

//

Sources and editorial notes

The numbered notes distinguish the speakers’ recollections and assertions from independently documented information. They do not turn the dialogue into a claim that every statement has been verified. Dates, estimates, and disputed assertions requested for restoration remain visible in the conversation; corrections appear here rather than being silently attributed to the speakers.

\[1\] “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” The complete reference is: Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012\. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” *Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society* 1 (1): 1–40\. Both authors are confirmed by the journal and the article’s first page. The article argues that decolonization concerns the repatriation of Indigenous land and life and should not serve as a general metaphor for other projects of social improvement. Yang’s name has been supplied in brackets in the dialogue. Sources: [journal record](https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org) and [full article](https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/download/18630/15554?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org).

\[2\] German and Persian speaker populations. Payam’s changing figures are retained as estimates, not verified totals. A meaningful comparison needs the same reference year and a distinction between first-language and additional-language speakers; Persian also requires clarity about the inclusion of Iranian Persian, Dari, and Tajik. Germany’s Federal Foreign Office cited approximately 100 million native German speakers in a 2012 speech; this is a dated native-speaker estimate, not a current total. A secondary compilation for Persian reports approximately 127 million total speakers using estimates dated 2020–2024, but its underlying figures were not independently verified for this edit. Neither source establishes that both languages each have 140 million speakers on a comparable basis. Sources: [Cornelia Pieper, Federal Foreign Office, 21 November 2012](https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/newsroom/news/121121-stm-p-pressehandbuch-252602?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org); [“Persian language,” Wikipedia, population summary and references](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian%5Flanguage?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org). The dialogue’s figures should remain explicitly approximate.

\[3\] Venice, 2019: work, panels, and languages. Slavs and Tatars’ participation in the 2019 Venice Biennale is confirmed by the Biennale’s official participant record. A contemporary exhibition report identifies *Tranny Tease (pour Marcel)*(2009–2016) in the Giardini and *Dillio Plaza* in the Arsenale. The artist’s project page describes *Tranny Tease* as a series of vacuum-formed panels exploring transliteration. These sources establish the participation and identify the panel work, but do not establish that the Venice installation comprised fifteen panels or exactly six or seven languages, nor confirm the complete language inventory. Those details remain Payam’s expressly uncertain recollection. Sources: [La Biennale di Venezia, artist entry, 2019](https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2019/partecipants/slavs-and-tatars?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org); [Slavs and Tatars, *Tranny Tease*](https://www.slavsandtatars.com/cycles/regions-d-etre/tranny-tease?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org); [Mohammad Salemy, “58th Venice Biennale: May You Live In Interesting Times,” *Ocula*, 24 May 2019](https://ocula.com/magazine/reports/58th-venice-biennale-may-you-live-in-interest/?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org).

\[4\] Lebanon–Palestine border chronology. The reference to the 1960s and 1970s is incorrect if it means the original delineation of the boundary between Lebanon and Mandatory Palestine. That boundary developed through Anglo-French agreements in 1920–1923, with the definitive agreement approved on 7 March 1923\. Later armistice arrangements and the UN’s Blue Line belong to different stages of this history. The original dates remain in the dialogue so the correction is transparent. Céline’s assertion that the border is “fake” expresses her political understanding of a continuity of land, identity, and life; it is distinct from the historical question of when the boundary was drawn. Source: [Khalil Gemayel, “The Palestine–Lebanon Border,” Institute for Palestine Studies / PalQuest](https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/37742/palestine-lebanon-border?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org).

\[5\] CIA cultural funding: historical evidence and present-day allegations. Covert CIA involvement in cultural activity during the Cold War is documented, including its support for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CIA’s own historical account describes the organisation’s covert origins and its cultural activities. That history does not, by itself, substantiate the broader present-tense assertion that the CIA funds US art through many foundations today, or establish intelligence links for any particular current foundation. No evidence supplied with the transcript or located for this edit establishes those contemporary claims or the asserted reason Slow Factory lacks such funding. They remain Céline’s allegations and interpretation. Sources: [Michael Warner, “Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949–1950,” CIA, *Studies in Intelligence* 38 (5)](https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/archives/vol-38-no-5/origins-of-the-congress-for-cultural-freedom-1949-1950/?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org); [“The Culture of Funding Culture: The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” Cambridge University Press](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/intelligence-studies-in-britain-and-the-us/culture-of-funding-culture-the-cia-and-the-congress-for-cultural-freedom/6C52FBAFE2C92D03B970C3CFDE68C766?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org). 

\[6\] Slow Factory’s funding status. “Isn’t funded by anything” is retained as Céline’s statement at the conversation, not an independently verified financial assessment. It should not be read as proof that Slow Factory has never had external support. In August 2023, *Teen Vogue* reported announced H&M support for Slow Factory’s Open Edu programme in 2023–2024 through an employee activism fund. This announcement does not establish funds actually disbursed, the organisation’s finances at the time of the talk, or any CIA connection. Source: [“Slow Factory Says H&M Employees Voted to Support Their Five-Year Plan,” *Teen Vogue*, 30 August 2023](https://www.teenvogue.com/story/handm-and-slow-factory-announce-a-new-five-year-sustainability-effort?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org). Slow Factory also publicly solicits donations for its educational work: [Open Edu](https://slowfactory.earth/open-edu?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org). Current funding and the intended scope of Céline’s statement require dated records or clarification. Havîn’s separate interjection has been restored without assuming whom “we” denotes.

\[7\] Gloria Steinem. There is documented historical substance to this reference: Steinem worked with the CIA-funded Independent Research Service, which organised American participation in international youth festivals during the Cold War. “Being part of the CIA” is the speaker’s broad wording; the more precise description is her work with that CIA-funded organisation. Markos Kounalakis discussed this history in an article published by USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy on 29 October 2015, well before the recent social-media discussion recalled here. That establishes earlier public discussion, but neither confirms nor disproves Slow Factory’s role in renewing attention. Source: [Markos Kounalakis, “The Feminist Was a Spy,” USC Center on Public Diplomacy](https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/feminist-was-spy?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org). Céline’s account of her platform’s influence remains her own; it has not been independently measured.

*Editorial disclaimer: This transcript has been edited for grammar, clarity, and length. Bracketed additions and numbered notes are editorial interventions, not words spoken at the event. Sources substantiate only the points identified in the notes; disputed or unverified claims remain attributed to the speakers.*